Deduplicated (or dedupable) memory provides a more efficient mechanism in which to store data. In traditional memory solutions, each data object is written to its own location in memory. The same data object might be stored in any number of locations in memory, each as a separate copy: the memory system has no way to identify or prevent this repetitious storage of data. For data objects that are large, this repetitious storage of data may be wasteful. Deduplicated memory, which stores only a single copy of any data object, attempts to address this problem.
But dedupable memory has a high latency and a slow performance. Executing a write request for a single piece of data may require actually writing data three times and reading data five times in the worst case. This high latency may be a deterrent in systems that need memory to be responsive.
A need remains for a way to improve the responsiveness of memory, whether or not subject to deduplication.